Review: Body Blow / Queer Screen FF

In the mix, it’s the three D’s: desire, danger and deviance. (What else could it be?) The ingredients to a killer cocktail, spiked with sparkling, saturated neons, scored to driving synths, and set on the nighttime streets of The Harbor City. Dotted with those familiar frames: a man with his hands on the wheel, the slightest furrow at the brow; a crowded nightclub, a moody performer; bodies in close-up and in slow-motion, the atmosphere of trouble. Already, it sounds like a film we’ve seen before, but Dean Francis’ Body Blow isn’t merely the return of the provocative thriller to the big screen. No, it goes further, reaching past the much loved subgenre with its lost craft, to grasp at an antecedent. At an older, truer core: the noir, a lexicon of troubled souls. ‘Body Heat was a huge inspiration’, Francis has admitted, ‘and Body Heat was also really inspired by Double Indemnity, so there’s this noir lineage that’s going on.’

Moreover, he retrofits it with an extent of queerness that allows not only for the reclamation of his characters’ on-screen destiny from its usual doom, but opens up the format itself, reactivating its codes of layered exploration for queer expression. (As it’s been noted elsewhere, even the mailman isn’t exempt.) Also suffused is that Australian flavour of laidback levity, a distinct lens through which topics as grave as addiction, police corruption and the miseducation of the ‘manosphere’ are creatively cohered.

Rich palettes and chiaroscuro refigure the space into a fever dream. The nightclub is the drag bar is the gambling den is the dungeon is the discotheque. An old-school style back-projected process shot followed by The Coke Sign; blending the real into the surreal, opening the familiar into fantasy. It’s the kind of flamboyance that’s both novel and nostalgic. Oxford Street makes for a great chase scene location. Typical of noir as well as of Aussie drama, the plot is well-furnished with tangents, tensions, and twists, and features some standout performances- most notably in Paul Capsis’ magnetic Queen of King’s Cross, ‘Fat Frankie’. Tim Pocock strikes a noteworthy balance as Aiden, a believably disgraced cop and naive compulsive. His provisional paramour, Tom Rodgers’s Cody, sets a new precedent for the sufferings and shifty seductions of the Homme Fatale. Sacha Horler plays the literal bad cop superior Constable Steele with a recognizable immediacy. These are characters you can care about and also laugh at. Even at its most outlandish, it is intentional, endearingly so.

More than anything, the film is a love letter: to the Sydney queer community, its underground and icons; to seductive thrills, to classical noir; to shimmers, incandescence, and to chickens. A long overdue revival, and self-described ‘deliberate act of resistance’, Body Blow is the kind of cheeky fun that can also become cult cannon, already drawing comparisons to the works of Brian De Palma, Paul Verhoeven, and William Friedkin’s Cruising. It leans so comfortably in, self-assured and self-aware, trading cards and all. As we say nowadays, this would’ve done numbers on Tumblr.